The invention relates to a system for implementing telephone services in one or more telephone installations comprising several telephone terminals managed by at least one private automatic branch exchange. This also relates to a control device for an automatic branch exchange and a CTI server.
The invention can be applied to services offered by systems known as CTI systems or computer telephony integration systems.
These are services that can presently be offered only to installations having recent-model automatic branch exchanges with a CTI link.
It may be recalled that a private automatic branch exchange is also known by the abbreviation PABX.
Furthermore, the term telephone terminal refers to any piece of equipment or telephone set used to access the switched telephone network (STN).
FIG. 1 is a drawing of a system offering computer telephony integration services according to the recent prior art.
There is thus a telephone installation 1 comprising telephone terminals 10 and a recent-generation automatic branch exchange 20 connected firstly to the switched telephone network STN and, secondly, to a piece of computer equipment 30 by means of a CTI link. This site also has telecommunications equipment 11A, 11B, 11C (computer equipment for example) connected by a telecommunications network to a voice telecommunications server and/or to a WEB server 50.
An authorized user who, by virtue of this fact, possesses a secret key to access the services rendered by the CTI server 30 may request these services by means of the pieces of equipment 11A or 11B if he is at the site on which the PABX 20 is installed. However, he can also request these services from outside using a piece of equipment 11C to access the CTI server through the voice server and/or the WEB site 50.
A CTI link generally complies with a standard protocol used in the market but this protocol is adapted and interpreted differently from one builder to another. Secondly, this link evolves for a given PABX with the different versions of PABX.
This implies that the CTI server must propose management systems (or drivers) by model and by version of PABX.
The management of a CTI server therefore becomes difficult and the updating operations are frequent. Furthermore, the CTI links do not always take the telephone call transfer function and the CTI server drives only one PABX at a time.
The computer equipment 30 is connected to a remote server used to offer telecommunications services.
The link between the computer equipment 30 and the server 50 is obtained through a computer network on which the communications protocol used is the TCP/IP protocol.
To date, there are few systems of the kind just described. These are indeed systems by which it is possible to provide relatively recent-generation services. Only the new generation automatic branch exchanges possess this possibility of having a computer telephony integration link with a piece of computer equipment.
The use of such CTI links proposed by PABX manufacturers in order to create certain telephone services are generally costly and their implementation differs from one PABX to another. Furthermore, as has just been pointed out, the CTI link is available only on recent-generation PABX devices.